The
following is a partial transcript from a talk held by Federici at Vancouver
on April 2006 (webcast here)

1486:
publication of the Malleus
Maleficarum; 1492: Columbus occupies Americas. These are the dates
that signal the culmination of the crisis of the feudal world, as a result
of long peasants' struggles, and the artisan workers' demand for independence
from merchants. Serfdom was coming to an end, despite the sustained attempt
of rulers to regain power. Globalisation began when the European elites
annexed America to Europe. With the rise of Protestantism, begging starts
being seen as a sin and becomes criminalised.

In
the 16th and 17th century population starts being treated as an instrument
of wealth creation; this changes the general attitude to procreation and
fatality.

A)
One explanation for the witch hunt is the attempt to take over the body
of women in order to control the source of labour. Like the slave trade,
the witch hunt became a means to control women, to the extent of criminalizing
reproductive autonomy. The economic utility of procreation demanded the
establishment of direct control over the reproductive process. The severity
of punishment of infanticide arose in the same period, as did capital
punishment for abortion. The witch hunt was instrumental to the appropriation
of women's bodies for the reproduction of the worker. This continues up
to our day. Even now, the state is fighting to control the production
of life, evidently in the boom of reproductive technologies and attempts
to make reproduction independent from women's bodies.

B)
The development of new work discipline and the intensification of labour
- despite technology, we now work more than ever - begins in the same
period as the witch hunt. The elite looks into all aspects of life (festivals,
community activities) as something to be eliminated as superfluous. An
attack is waged on all forms of sexuality that is 'unproductive'. The
demonisation of female sexuality went hand in hand with the new work discipline.

C)
The process whereby the work that goes into the reproduction of life is
devalued. Every activity that is useful to the reproduction of the capacity
to work is declared as non-work. With capitalism all reproductive activity
became feminised, and women become expelled from wage labour. Women's
labour disappears as work. The division of labour is the basis of a hierarchy
o labour along gender lines, and wage is the tool of separation. The violence
that characterised the relation between men and women is embedded in this
disparity. The ideology of the witch hunt says that there is something
wrong with women who have money, in fact the most commonly persecuted
figure is the prostitute. Witch hunt per se did not cause this devaluation
of reproduction; that was rather the product of a restructuring of capitalism.
Nonetheless, witch hunt was necessary to discipline women into this new
role, to create new functions and identities. These have naturalised women's
exploitation, hiding it and making it appear as something of nature.

The
roots of sexism and racism are the same: a situation where you need workers
without rights. Enslavement is essential to this process of accumulation
and these have not been one time events; these developments became structural
to capitalist society. In the last twenty years you can see similar developments.
A globalisation based on land expropriation, migration, an increase in
the impoverishment of women, mass prostitution, baby markets etc. As a
result of present globalising drives, there has been an explosion of violence
against women. Over the last fifteen years there has been a return to
witch hunting, in Ghana for instance. The redefinition of the social position
of women turns the woman into a kind of compensation for the man's loss
of power. The woman is a new common, seen as the new nature, like water
etc, something everyone can go and get.

The
way sexuality is used, the sex industry has been restructured to define
aa relationship between men and the female body which is violent.

(1995) (ed) Enduring
Western Civilization: The Construction of the Concept of Western Civilization
and Its "Others". Westport, Connecticut and London: Praeger.

(1999) "Reproduction
and Feminist Struggle in the New Internaitonal Division of Labor"
in (Dalla Costa and Dalla Costa (eds) (1999) Women, Development and
the Labor of Reproduction, Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.

(2000) (ed) A
Thousand Flowers: Structural Adjustment and the Struggle for Education
in Africa, Africa World Press.